The invention relates to a guardrail for protecting persons being present on open floors of buildings or scaffolds against accidentally falling out of the opening of such floors. The guardrail comprises a number of constructional elements and connectors for assembling said constructional elements to a coherent guardrail.
The invention also relates to a method for assembling said guardrail.
The term constructional element is within the context of the present invention a device which has a relatively large extent in two dimensions and a relatively little thickness in the third dimension and which is preferably without any opening or at least without any openings large enough for allowing a person to pass through.
During erecting of some multi-story building are the outer walls around a floor often not yet built. A similar situation exists during erection of scaffolds.
Persons such as workers being present on such open floors need to be safely protected against accidentally falling out of the openings of the floors so that they do not risk to be seriously injured when hitting e.g. the ground below.
Many attempts have during the years been made to solve this important problem with the result that various kinds of guardrails to be attached to or close to the edge of the respective floors have been developed.
Such guardrails consist normally of a number of vertical posts, which each is releasable attached to an open floor at an edge of this, and of a number of horizontal rails, which each is releasable attached to the posts.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,787,475 discloses a guardrail of this kind. A disadvantage of this known guardrail is however that a number of openings are left between the posts and the rails. Said openings are unfortunately large enough to allow a person accidentally to falling out of the openings.
Also tools and other objects could accidentally fall out of said openings and hit persons below whereby those persons could be seriously injured since such tools and objects often are relatively heavy.
Another disadvantage of said known guardrail consists in the fact that the posts and rails of this are relatively long and therefore troublesome and dangerous to handle within an often narrow space close to the edge of the open floor.
Since such open floors often are relatively inaccessible and placed at a relatively high level the long posts and rails are moreover difficult to transport up to such floors and down again to the ground.
The posts and rails of this known guardrail are furthermore assembled by means of connections such as hinges, which make the guardrail unstable and easy to destroy.
It is furthermore difficult to connect the cross-joints between the posts and rails of the known guardrail because it during the assembling of the guardrail is necessary to manually hold the long rails in the required horizontal position.
Owing to the lots of such connections to be carried out for assembling the post and rails to a finished guardrail extending along the edges of an open floor is the assembling of the guardrail also very time consuming.
Such guardrails are normally used only within a limited period of time after which the guardrails need to be dismantled again and removed from the floor whereby the above-mentioned problems appear again but in the inversed order.